Traditionally, television has been a passive form of entertainment, with very limited modes of interactivity. Currently there exists no means by which a user can interact with the broadcast signals to access information related to the broadcast content or trigger other sophisticated functions. This is especially unfortunate in the current information age where there has been an explosion of information about countless topics in various forms. The personal computer has recently become the preferred device for information access, mainly due to the increasing popularity and growth of the Internet. Thus, the user typically has to either subscribe to an information service provider or have direct access to the Internet. In such a scenario, if the user is interested in gathering information related to television content, independent searches on available information services must be conducted.
To avoid this cumbersome procedure and enrich the television content, a simpler system for user interaction with broadcast signals and direct information transmission is necessary. The anticipated merging of the television and the Personal Computer (PC) as a single source for entertainment and information will facilitate any implementation of the invention presented here. For example, PCs that are enabled to receive broadcast signals are recently available. In addition, the relatively inexpensive “Web PC” is another example of a device that augments ordinary television. Apart from these devices, communication networks capable of carrying high bandwidth data will soon be available to homes, enabling interactive broadcast systems. These advances in infrastructure call for new methods that will facilitate and utilize the marriage between entertainment and information access devices.
Interactive television includes several different applications such as video-on-demand, home shopping, and others. Using interactive television the users have complete control to allow them to specify different actions such as the choice of a movie to be shown or item to purchase. Several different system architectures have been proposed for such systems. However, these require tremendous technological advances in the areas of communications and networking, video servers, etc. and a large investment in infrastructure such as laying new cable to individual homes.
Markup languages such as HTML have been used to enrich standard text documents into hypertext format by including tags that precede and follow logical portions of the document. When the hypertext document is parsed, the markup tags can be separated from the surrounding data and these markup statements contain the information such as hyperlinks, anchors and annotations which will help the hypertext functions (such as database access), representation schemes and interface modalities. Hypermedia has also been proposed in which elements such as text, graphics, speech, pictures and animation can be networked together. Hypermedia can also be loosely defined as multimedia data with hyperlinks.
Ordinary television broadcast signals only contain video and audio information producing a very passive medium of entertainment with limited methods of interactivity. In recent years, a limited amount of interactivity has been provided by adding information into the broadcast signals. Wink® communications include additional relevant data into the television signal such as sports statistics, or movie information that can be activated by the viewer. Intercast®, Hypercast® and certain other systems insert web data into the video and audio stream. However, these systems do not allow viewers to interact among themselves and consequently watching a movie at home is never akin to a theater experience due to the lack of audience interaction. Additionally, all of these systems result in multiple users requesting the same data from the web server simultaneously creating a tremendous load on the server and the network. Therefore, there is a need for a system and method by which the broadcast media can be made active and the user can then interact with the signals.